David Allen's new Palm Treo 700p.

Two weeks ago, I helped move David Allen from his old Palm to a Treo 700p. I used mNotes, by Commontime to keep David's 700p in sync with the Lotus Notes applications we use at The David Allen Company. mNotes is a tool that allows for bidirectional synchronization of PIM apps (e-Mail, Calendar, Tasks, Address book and Memos) between Lotus Notes and mobile devices, like the Treo 700p.

I thought that Palm platform is dead but recent Treo 700p reviews are encouraging. The most interesting fact is that PalmOS based Treo 700p seems to be superior to the Windows based Treo 700w.

Comment

The palm is not dead yet ... it's problem is in the corporate environment. IT folks don't want to support it. They either go for the MS Mobile PC or Blackberry OS. Part of this relates, as I understand it, to the fact that palm does not have a server side solution (a.k.a blackberry) to push out emails ... a big deal breaker for a lot of companies.

On the 700P vs 700W, most reviews I've read also favor the 700P (Palm OS) over the MS Mobile OS. In my humble view the Palm OS is a "neater" OS built from the ground up. MS Mobile on the other hand is a build down ... and as such suffers from to many menus etc.

For Palm (Yr) 2006 appears to be a critical year. They indicated that 3 Treo models would be out ... 2 to date, with one to follow. Plus there is the need to roll out the new Treos to all the wireless carriers to get greater marketplace traction. This against a background of increasing competition in this market. Time will tell ... in the meantime a 700P would be nice (as long as it works on my carrier (cinguar)) as it may just get me back to using the palm over paper.

Comment

I'm guessing you'll be able to get the 700p on Cingular eventually since they already carry the 600 and 650.

The big plus for Blackberry and Windows in the corporate environment is the integration with Microsoft Exchange Server, which includes much more than just email (you can set up and respond to meetings, etc., from your device). Palm would need to solve this problem to play more effectively in that space.

The T-Mobile Sidekick does a much better job with email than the Treo does but is not good PDA otherwise. Palm multitasking still stinks and you still need add-on software like Agendus and ChatterMail to make it really useful, but I've carried the iPaq, the BlackBerry, and the Sidekick and right now I am happier with a Palm in my pocket.

On the 700P vs 700W, most reviews I've read also favor the 700P (Palm OS) over the MS Mobile OS. In my humble view the Palm OS is a "neater" OS built from the ground up. MS Mobile on the other hand is a build down ... and as such suffers from to many menus etc.

Square pegs
We also wanted to enable devices with keyboards on the front, like the ones you're seeing now. And we knew that a portrait rectangular screen with a qwerty keyboard would make the device too big. So, while we were doing the work to lay stuff out for higher resolution, we also did it for square. It was pretty natural to take a 240x320 screen, lop off 80 pixels, and make it 240x240. It was similarly natural to take a 480x640 screen and support 480x480. So those are the square resolutions we support.

We actively talked about doing 320x320. But we decided against it for a number of reasons. The first was that there's no good backward compatibility story for it. You can pixel double, but "pixel one and a half" doesn't work very well. The next was that there's not much of a growth path for 320x320. Hardware vendors told us that they had no plans to make 640x640 screens (where they do have plans to make 480x480 screens).

So, why did Palm go with 320x320 for their non-WM devices? If you study their history, you'll find that they made all the same decisions we made. It's just that their original resolution was 160x160. So, when it came time to choose their higher resolution, it was natural for them to pixel double up to 320x320. We're in an unfortunate situation at the moment where we're comparing the high res PalmOS device to the low res WM device.